Yesterday on the Clinton campaign’s conference call, a reporter asked, “If Bill Richardson is Judas Iscariot in the mind of James Carville, who is Hillary in that metaphor?” (The Hillary camp didn’t want to touch that answer.) A Democratic strategist yesterday told me yesterday he’s more interested in another part of the metaphor: What were the “thirty silver pieces”?

It’s a brilliant bit of nasty political jujitsu to audaciously charge, without evidence, that Richardson traded his endorsement for a reward of some kind. What Carville’s comment does is make it much harder for a President Obama to put Richardson in his cabinet. Not impossible, obviously, but Secretary-of-State-designate Richardson (to pick a hypothetical example) would inevitably face questions of whether there was a quid pro quo for his endorsement. Richardson would start any new position with a bit of a taint as, after all, “Carville said he sold his endorsement back in March 2008…”

UPDATE: Carville on CNN yesterday:

“I was using a biblical metaphor and it had the desired intent. People called me left and right and said, ‘Whenever I see that guy, I’ll can’t help but think of that quote,’” Carville said on CNN.

The whole point of Carville’s comment was vengeance, to forever associate Richardson with the man who betrayed Jesus Christ.

An interesting lesson coming out of this elongated Democratic primary is how Democrats aren’t just nasty, unfair, no-holds-barred artists of the politics of personal destruction when fighting across the aisle; they can’t keep their claws sheathed and their bile repressed when fighting within the party, folks who were their closest allies not too long ago.

Were there tempers flaring and bad blood on the Republican side? Sure. But I don’t know if there were surrogates calling each other monsters, or bringing up the equivalent of Monica’s dress, or “while you were working for that slumlord”, or accusing each other of trying to disenfranchise voters, etc. And day by day, those fights seem further away.

I wonder if the winner of an intensely negative Democratic primary goes even more negative on the GOP candidate in the fall, whether voters will just recoil and conclude they’ve had enough after two years of campaigning…